Film of the Week: El Mariachi (1993)

A young 23 year old director named Robert Rodriguez shot this film, and its immediate success shot him into the league of great directors. Very few people enter the film industry as directors and make enough of a success on their first film to have a career in the industry, so any time a young man struts into the film business and becomes a director, it speaks quite well for his work. El Mariachi is an interesting idea for a film. The plot concerns a criminal seeking revenge, who carries a guitar case full of weapons, and a young mariachi looking for work who arrives in town the same day. Rodriguez takes the standard mistaken identity plot, usually used for comedy, and turns it into a high intensity action film, that ends tragically for everyone except the thrilled viewer.